WiiKey vs Softmod - Help needed please!

Hi Everyone,
I have a wii that I bought several years ago, and modded with a wiikey v1. Currently the wiikey is running 1.9s, and the wii is still on 3.2U. Like many others, I've been out of the scene for a little while now, and now just starting to get a little bit of time to get back into it. I'd like to be able to play my backups of some of the newer games, but I know that this is going to take a little updating/configuring either way. However, almost everything on all of the wii boards, is now all about softmodding! To us wiikey guys, this stuff is mostly irrelevant.

I guess the point I' getting at, is that I'm seriously debating the pros and cons of even keeping the wiikey in use, but I don't know enough about softmodding to decide. Is there any benefit to keeping my wiikey, and continually screwing around with an out-dated chip, just to try and keep new stuff running, and maintain a clean dashboard? Is there anything that the wiikey can do that softmodding can't? How about anything that softmodding can do that wiikey can't? It seems like I'm going to have to do some softmodding either way to apply some of the IOS's needed for some newer anyhow, right? I'm really just trying to decide if now is the time to give up on my much-loved wiikey, and just make the switch-over to softmodding. Any dangers to doing this? If I do decide to switch over, will I need to remove the wiikey? If not necessary, are there any benefits or downfalls to doing so?

Has anyone else here made the change-over, and if so, was it the right choice for you? I guess I'm just feeling a little lost and overwhelmed at the amount of info out there... of which a very MINIMAL amount is relevant to wiikey users anymore. Any and all thoughts, insight, and info is GREATLY appreciated.

There is a beta update for this h/w device here. The benefits for softmodding is you can USB HD to game. To play out of region games on a hardmod (irrelevant on softmod, not a limitation there) you cannot update past 4.1 as 4.2 will lock you out of this. Your Wii can have the best of both worlds - hardmod and softmod the same unit.

I feel the same way. Been out of the scene for a while. I just recently burned some new games, though, and they work fine with original Wiikey on 4.2U. Seems like the modchip still works fine and is hassle free compared to all the stuff I need to do for softmodding. The day I can't play a game I want I'll switch over to softmod.

Go for it!

Hey;

I was in the exact same situation you are in my friend. 3.2U, 1.99 (beta firmware) on WiiKey v1. Got sick of the new games requiring the newer IOS's to be able to play. Found out the hard way that no DVD's in USA will upgrade you to only 4.1u. Online is a "no-go" with 4.2 and the region-free losses to suffer....so I bit the bullet and did the softmod.

I followed the guide on this site "SoftMod ANY Wii to 4.1" which took a couple of hours total to complete but everything works great. I needed the GC Launcher to deal with launching GameCube disks because for whatever reason, the WiiKey will not detect GC discs any more without it. Just make sure you use a SanDisk 2GB memory card and make sure your Internet Connection works because some of this stuff is downloaded automatically by the installers. HomeBrew is pretty cool, and there are plenty of goodies to download especially if you use the HomeBrew Browser. Get the latest NeoGamma Launcher too. It will help with the future BCA protected games from what I hear.